Border Tech Full of Holes

The idea was bold, when it was pro­posed back in 2003: a “futur­is­tic sur­veil­lance and intel­li­gence net­work” to reg­u­late immi­gra­tion, “rely[ing] on data­bases, dig­i­tal cam­eras, face– and voice-​​recognition sys­tems and electronic-​​fingerprint read­ers, all linked by com­puter.“
But nearly two years later, the next-​​gen promises of the US-​​VISIT “vir­tual bor­der” project have been left by the way­side, the Washington Post reports. What’s left is decidely less impres­sive — creaky and old-​​school.

For now, US-​​VISIT is rely­ing on sev­eral aging and inef­fec­tive com­puter sys­tems that were designed in the 1990s by con­trac­tors for the for­mer Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was merged in 2003 into the new Homeland Security Department…
One of the pro­grams [is] a com­puter net­work known as IDENT, which requires trav­el­ers to sub­mit prints of both index fin­gers at U.S. con­sulates and embassies over­seas. IDENT then col­lects two index fin­ger­prints from those vis­i­tors at the U.S. bor­der and matches them against a data­base to deter­mine whether they are allowed into the coun­try…
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, under con­gres­sional man­date to develop bio­met­ric stan­dards for screen­ing for­eign vis­i­tors, rec­om­mended the gov­ern­ment use 10 fin­ger­prints. Using all 10 prints pro­vides bet­ter match­ing capa­bil­i­ties and inter­op­er­abil­ity with other data­bases, the sci­en­tists said in their 2003 report.
US-​​VISIT offi­cials did not heed the sci­en­tists’ advice…They promised to upgrade the two-​​fingerprint IDENT sys­tem.
Last fall, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner said author­i­ties had made improve­ments to the IDENT sys­tem so it could com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively with the FBI’s data­base…
But the government’s own stud­ies show IDENT is not fully inte­grated with the FBI sys­tem. One study by the Justice Department’s inspec­tor general’s office, released three months after Bonner’s remarks, con­cluded that progress toward mak­ing IDENT fully inter­op­er­a­ble with other sys­tems, includ­ing the FBI’s, has “stalled.“
The technology’s lim­its and the government’s desire to avoid long delays curbs the num­ber of peo­ple who can be thor­oughly screened. This year, home­land secu­rity offi­cials expect to check about 800 peo­ple out of the roughly 118,000 vis­i­tors a day who should be screened against the FBI data­base, the Justice Department’s inspec­tor gen­eral said.
“The lack of imme­di­ate access to the FBI’s full crim­i­nal mas­ter file cre­ates a risk that a ter­ror­ist could enter the coun­try unde­tected,” the inspec­tor gen­eral found.
Last fall, Stanford University researcher Lawrence M. Wein tes­ti­fied before Congress that US-​​VISIT, using IDENT, had no more than a 53 per­cent chance of catch­ing a ter­ror­ist who had altered his or her fin­ger­prints, even if that per­son was on a ter­ror­ist watch list. Wein said author­i­ties should not assume the cur­rent two-​​fingerprint sys­tem is suf­fi­cient to stop ter­ror­ists. “It would be naive to think that these peo­ple are not try­ing to defeat the sys­tem,” he said.

May 23rd, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.